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Study Says Massachusetts Best State For Technology
Anonymous Coward writes "The Milken Institute (site is cnn/msnbc/wapo dotted it seems) has released a study claiming MA is the best state for technology while Texas has dropped to 26th. I'm curious on everyone's thoughts on this. It seems to me Arizona and Austin are most attractive because of the low cost of living and lots of open space. I just don't see (in my job hunting) very many start-up or expansion in the states they list at the top.
Lots more at Google News."
Reader footh adds a link to a PDF of the results.
for the "low cost of living and lots of open space"
One could argue it's because the natural migration of people just hasn't put too many people there yet. While 10 miles outside of NYC is almost as urban as the city itself.
But I like to think it's because not many people want to live in a dry, desolate land.
It's people like you that are the reason Arizona is an open-carry state.
*BLAM* *BLAM*
We're supposed to turn off our critical thinking caps and turn on the groupthink here.
Seriously, though, I really hope people don't try to pawn this study off as scientific amongst friends or family members. What a lame excuse to support a baseless position.
Calling Austin a cheap place to live just shows how liberal-biased the article is. Compare Austin to anywhere else in Texas and you'll see that Austin is like twice the cost of anywhere else.
Of course, it doesn't stack up to Massachusetts or Conneticut, where labor unions drive up the price of Ice Cream to 5 or 6 dollars a scoop. Yeah, I guess we don't have it that bad.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
That probably just means you were hanging out with a more timid crowd.
Besides, MIT used to be one of the biggest drinking schools, until a freshman in 1997 intoxicated himself to death when pledging. If an outsider lke you knows about the parties, that just means we weren't doing a good job keeping it quiet.
Background: Lived in Boston (Back Bay, the Allston ghetto & the North End) for a decade. Went to school for four of those 10. Worked with a fashion photographer for 3 years (did a lot of work for the Improper Bostonian and Stuff@Nite).
The girls are not hot. The school I attended (B.U.) had probably the best selection of attractive women, but if you've ever been to Germany or the Czech Republic and walked around, or hell, even California, you would be decidely unimpressed.
The thing that confuses some people is that there are a lot of young people. Young does not mean hot.
The nightlife is decent, but the previous poster is clearly unaware of the good hotspots. His mentality is similar to 95% of the young students that arrive in Boston, fresh-faced and new. "I'm free! Let's pound some beer and dance badly to awful, uninspired techno!" While there are a few scattered places that are nice, it's not like the city's a cultural mecca.
If you're on the Eastern seaboard and want to see attractive women, you're going to have to head to New York. In the U.S., the attractive women go to the expensive cities. It's just a fact of life. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they involve heading into the Great Plains, where there's NO nightlife, or parts of the south, where you'll have to deal with heat and, well, southerners.
"I met an entire group of high level EE/CS types who were relocating to Alaska to work on a missle defense program and one other had a job with the State of Alaska."
Ah yes, what a great job, I imagine its a top secret clearance giving the government the right to know every intimate detail of your life for the rest of your life, to dictate where you travel and who you associate with.
You also have a chance to work on a program on which the U.S. will waste billions and billions of dollars and it probably wont work when the time comes, or it will get cancelled when someone comes to their senses and it will all be wasted just like it was the first time around under Reagan.
From the 9/11 hearings and Richard Clark's testimony it appears the Bush administration was totally fixated on this absurd program to the exclusion of the real threat, terrorism. End result, we start building Star Wars again, cut FBI funds for counterterrorism and we get attacked with civilian airlines by a few committed Islamic fundamentalists who spent like a half million dollars to kill 3,000 people and inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage on the U.S. and could probably do it again.
But you have to think like the Bush administration. To them Reagan was like a god and Reagan wanted missile defense so 20 years later we have to restart this bloody waste of money. Condi Rice is a specialist in the Soviet Union, so as evidence of her failure to adapt to the modern world she was also probably real keen on this.
On the plus side, for the Bush administration, it does pumps billions of dollars in to their big aerospace company friends which is why they offer such great jobs:
Lucrative aerospace jobs = massive budget deficit
About the one chance this thing has to do anything of value is it might shoot down a North Korean missile. We still haven't figured out why we took down Iraq who had no missiles worth mentioning and no nukes while North Korea is happily humming along with both. One guess is North Korea is not a big threat to Isreal while Saddam was so we did their bidding in a proxy war for them.
In most ways missile defense has a disturbing resemblance to the Maginot line. Its hugely expensive to build and any potential enemy is going to have absolutely no problem circumventing it. If North Korea wants to nuke the U.S. they just slip a nuke in on a tramp steamer. If Russia or China wants to beat this in a full fledge missile attack they swamp it with decoys and build manuevering warheads, which is their plan as of a month or two ago, or they launch cruise missile from subs. In the case of Russia this appears very likely to reignite a strategic arms race. This does make all the Bush administration cold warrior relics pleased as punch. We can just never stop the arms race even if we are the only one running lately and it appears likely to bankrupt the U.S. eventually just like it did the U.S.S.R.
@de_machina
Parent post is not flamebait. It is an accurate and insightful account of the systematic destruction of what was once genuinely one of the best educational systems in the country. I swear to God, there's a group of right-wingers on /. who spend all their mod points on hunting and moderating down any post that dares to criticize their Glorious Leader.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Hmmm. I must have been moderated as Flamebait by a Bush backer. What exactly is flame bait when I offer URL's backing the basic facts in the post which is VERY relevant to a discussion of the Texas educational system:
- Texas, in general, and Houston in particular were touted as model school systems and a great success story. So much so they were integral in the Bush presidential campaing in 2000 and used as a model for the federal program we are pinning our hopes on to save the U.S. education system
- Its then discovered that the Houston school system's stellar performance was not because it was teaching kids but because they were forging dropout statistics by calling dropouts, transfers.
- Rod Paige then calls the NEA, a major national teachers association, a "terrorist" organization and gets away unscathed as is typical for abusive behavior in the bush administration like outing a CIA agent.
Ah well. The truth hurts some people I guess. You probably also don't want to hear about all the wicked underhandedness the Bush administration used to pass their Medicare drug bill or about those WMD's in Iraq or absence thereof.
@de_machina
In other words, you're wasting your time cutting someone else down AC-style. In the best Slashdot tradition.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.